Quantum mechanics is not magic. Magic specifies the outcome, but not how a system evolves to reach that outcome. Quantum mechanics has precise equations describing how a system will evolve over time, but is famously bad at describing the outcome.

By the same token, we can see that thermodynamics and conservation laws, while widely accepted, are magic. I have heard legend of a deeper magic known as “Lagragians”, although knowledge of that lost art remains confines to the warlocks’ ivory tower.

https://xkcd.com/2904/

The AI developers understand how AI works, but that does not mean that they understand the thing that the AI is trained to detect.

For instance, the cutting edge in protein folding (at least as of a few years ago) is Google’s AlphaFold. I’m sure the AI researchers behind AlphaFold understand AI and how it works. And I am sure that they have an above average understanding of molecular biology. However, they do not understand protein folding better than the physisits and chemists who have spent their lives studying the field. The core of their understanding is “the answer is somewhere in this dataset. All we need to do is figure out how to through ungoddly amounts of compute at it, and we can make predictions”. Working out how to productivly throw that much compute power at a problem is not easy either, and that is what ML researchers understand and are experts in.

In the same way, the researchers here understand how to go from a large dataset of breast images to cancer predictions, but that does not mean they have any understanding of cancer. And certainly not a better understanding than the researchers who have spent their lives studying it.

An open problem in ML research is how to take the billions of parameters that define an ML model and extract useful information that can provide insights to help human experts understand the system (both in general, and in understanding the reasoning for a specific classification). Progress has been made here as well, but it is still a long way from being solved.

The actual difference between a working new mouse and a failing double click mouse is in the button itself (mechanical parts are almost always the problem).

However, it is not some exotic failure mode. All mechanical switches have a “bounce”, where the contact makes and breaks a few times before settling into the connected position. Switches are typically designed to make the actual contact spring loaded (which is the origin of the click sound you here). As they age, this mechanism degrades, making the bouncing problem worse.

However, this is a well understood problem that any electrical engineer should be familiar with. One solution is to install a filter capacitor. Now it takes longer to switch between the on and off state, so the inherent bounce in the switch is smoothed out to the point where you cannot detect it.

They probably did testing with a new switch, and decided that they didn’t need to include any explicit debounce component, ignoring the fact that the switch would degrade over its lifetime.

The annoying thing is that fixing the double click is stupidly easy. Years ago, I got frustrated with that exact problem (after a string of 3 mice that each lasted only a few months); so I opened one up and soldered on a random capacitor I had lieing around.

Capacitors like that cost literally less than a penny, and are no more complicated to install at production time than any other component already on the circuit board.

1 line of code?

Amateur, I changed 1 byte of code in the Linux kernel!

It was random driver with something along the lines of “if (hardware_version > 3) fail()”.

One day we got a new shipment of hardware that wasn’t working for some reason until I upped that 3 to a 4.

I think what happened here is that something went wrong and messed up the permissions of some of the users files. MS help suggested that he login as an administrator and reatore the intended permissions.

I don’t work with Windows boxes, but see a similar situation come up often enough on Linux boxes. Typically, the cause is that the user elevated to root (e.g. the administrator account) and did something that probably should have been done from their normal account. Now, root owns some user files and things are a big mess until you go back to root and restore the permissions.

It use to be that this type of thing was not an issue on single user machines, because the one user had full privileges. The industry has since settled on a model of a single user nachine where the user typically has limited privileges, but can elevate when needed. This protects against a lot of ways a user can accidentally destroy their system.

Having said that, my understanding of Windows is that in a typical single user setup, you can elevate a single program to admin privileges by right clicking and selecting “run as administrator”, so the advice to login as an administrator may not have been nessasary.

In addition to the raw compute power, the HP laptop comes with a:

• monitor
• keyboard/trackpad
• charger
• windows 11
• active cooling system
• enclosure

I’ve been looking for a lapdock [0], and the absolute low-end of the market goes for over $200, which is already more expensive than the hp laptop despite spending no money on any actual compute components.

Granted, this is because lapdocks are a fairly niche product that are almost always either a luxury purchase (individual users) or a rounding error (datacenter users)

[0] Keyboard/monitor combo in a laptop form factor, but without a built in computer. It is intended to be used as an interface to an external computer (typically a smartphone or rackmounted server).

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Miniaturization is amazing. The limiting factor to how powerful we can make phones is not space to put in computational units (processors,ram,etc). It is the ability to deal with the heat they generate (and the related issue of rationing a limited amount of battery power)

At a $188 price point. An additional 4GB of memory would probably add ~$10 to the cost, which is over a 5% increase. However, that is not the only component they cheaped out on. The linked unit also only has 64GB of storage, which they should probably increase to have a usable system …

And soon you find that you just reinvented a mid-market device instead of the low-market device you were trying to sell.

4GB of ram is still plenty to have a functioning computer. It will not be as capable of a more powerful computer, but that comes with the territory of buying the low cost version of a product.

Because the thing people refer to when they say “linux” is not actually an operating system. It is a family of operating systems built by different groups that are built mostly the same way from mostly the same components (which, themselves are built by separate groups).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom_of_choice

The axiom of choice asserts that it is possible to pick an arbitrary element from every set. Most of mathametics accepts this. However constructivist math does not.

Sudo is a setuid binary, which means it executes with root permissions as a child of of the calling process. This technically works, but gives the untrusted process a lot of ways to mess with sudo and potentially exploit it for unauthorized access.

Run0 works by having a system service always running in the background as root. Running a command just sends a message to the already running seevice. This leaves a lot less room for exploits.

No. It is the equivalent of a PC maker going “yeah. I don’t think we are going to put in a CD drive anymore because the DVD drive we have been including for years can do CDs as well”

And the police did stop traffic from getting onto the bridge. Listening to the police audio [0], it sounds like they were in position almost immediately after the request came in. Having said that, I don’t think they were quite fast enough for the traffic already on the bridge to get off.

If they had responded faster, they might have made it in time for the one officer to be on the bridge evacuating the workers when it collapsed. With the benefit of hindsight, that would have accomplished nothing except 1 more death.

I’m often pretty critical of police, but I see absolutely nothing they could have done better in this case.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/03/26/baltimore-key-bridge-collapse-maryland/#link-SG74QTQZKNCI7CT3KCUCWYEZYQ

I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.

Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called “Linux”, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.

There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine’s resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called “Linux” distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.

The difference between physics and magic is that physics works by describing the forces acting on a system. To predict an outcome, you just progressivly apply those forces over time.

With magic, you just specify the outcome, but not how you get there.

This is how we know that thermodynamics is magic. Conservation laws and Lagrangeans too.

https://xkcd.com/2904/

You joke, but after cosmonaut Alexi Leonov complained about the possibility of a bear attack, the TP-82 shotgun was standard issue on Russian spacecraft for decades.

There are still a lot of rather arbitrary decisions to make.

Is 4/pi inside or outside of the summation?

Is it (-1)^n+1 or (-1)^n with an additional negative sign in any of the other natural locations for it.

Is the e term outside of the fraction with a negative exponent, or part of the denominator.

Do you start with n=0 or n=1 (and adjust the terms inside the summation accordingly)

Did they expand (2n+1)^2?

As a kid I attended a Jewish day school, and we had a year long class on European-Jewish history through the Holocaust.

The post screenshotted (allegedly from the AGA) reads almost like it came right out of that era as a piece of anti-semetic propoganda.

Seriously. Weather the post was actually from the AGA, or an anti-semetic propogandist, it is 100% blood libel, and should treated as such.